Drillinginfo Deploys Nexenta SDS

Nexenta Systems, Inc. announced the deployment of its platform for Drillinginfo, Inc., an Austin-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider of data-driven intelligence to the oil and gas industry.

What began as a simple online permit and completion-mapping database in 1999, became one of the 500 fastest growing companies in the US by 2008, according to Inc. Magazine, and has one of the largest oil and gas databases in the world. Drillinginfo delivers game-changing information for oil and gas energy exploration decision support, enabling companies to get insights faster.

Prior to drilling for oil, companies must evaluate up to eight different silos of data to meet regulatory and compliance guidelines; the ultimate goal is to have the least amount of risk – and the greatest success in finding oil. Seismic and geological data provide analysis of rock structures, based on drilling location. Legal documents, such as county court records for leases, date back hundreds of years. The volume of data that oil companies must sift through is immense, growing every year, and becoming more and more complicated to access and analyze.

Drillinginfo’s CTO, Mike Couvillion said: “When our storage architect, Andy Davis, approached me about the company’s growing storage requirements, we discussed the need to implement a scalable platform that would support our current and future storage requirements.“

Drillinginfo has roughly 900TB of data, and adds roughly 20-25TB of data per month.

Nexenta supports Drillinginfo’s rapid growth –
while meeting the company’s budgeting, financial and planning requirements.
Drillinginfo turned to NexentaStor, Nexenta’s SDS platform, as a replacement for its current storage system.

“Our storage team doesn’t have to worry about running out of storage as we add data and the systems are fully HA – there isn’t a single point of failure,” added Couvillion.

As Couvillion’s team analyzes the financial benefit of using Nexenta, the most important metric is cost per terabyte.: “Because the Nexenta system is so redundant, it can be put on Supermicro, which costs us about $416/TB. That is well below the industry average, and there is no additional licensing for replication. At that cost, the Nexenta SDS practically recovers its cost on delivery.“

“Drillinginfo is a perfect example of how software-defined dtorage can eliminate performance and scalability challenges,” said Jill Orhun, VP marketing and strategy, Nexenta. “The right decision on storage is instrumental to running effective infrastructure, and that has ramifications for companies’ bottom line. Nexenta is proud to assist Drillinginfo with managing and storing its large volume of business-critical data.“

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